Alan Stewart’s UK and Ireland family history news

Ancestry launches Web Search in the UK

Ancestry.co.uk has begun to index databases from other UK websites via Web Search.

The first UK database index to be made available is The National Archives’ Death Duty Registers Index 1796-1811. Two Irish databases have already been indexed in this way (Ireland Burial Index 1600-1927, and County Kerry Burial Index 1898-2010), as have many databases from the USA and a few from other countries (Canada, the Netherlands and Norway).

About Web Search, Ancestry says: “A wealth of genealogical information is made available online by libraries, local governments, genealogical societies, universities and genealogists. Ancestry.co.uk Web Search makes it easy to find records from many of these content publishers. To help you find genealogy information wherever it exists, we summarize basic information from freely-available web records and provide a link to the original site where you can view the full record, including any associated images.

“The guiding principles of Web Search are:

Free access to Web Records – Users do not have to subscribe or even register with Ancestry.co.uk to view these records;

Proper attribution of Web Records to content publishers;

Easy access to Web Records – Prominent links in search results and the record page make it easy to get to the source website.

“Web Records are published online by entities other than Ancestry.co.uk. What you see on Ancestry.co.uk is an index of basic information (such as names, dates, places and family members) that aids in searching. Often you can find out much more by visiting the source website, including references, publication information, comments, historical context, and even images. In some cases you may need to perform a search on the external website to find the record you’re looking for.

“Web Records are freely searchable and accessible without any registration or sign-in required. We look for family history records on free-to-access websites that we think will be of interest to you. Our goal is to provide pointers to as many interesting free family history records on other websites as possible in order to provide the best available genealogy search experience.

“Only freely-available websites which allow indexing are included in the Web Search index. Sites can be added to or removed from Web Search by owner request. We follow web standards for restricting crawling (robots.txt files). If a website has a robots.txt file that prohibits crawling the genealogical records, we don’t search those records.”